IE 8 Compatibility Mode and SharePoint

Recently, the Inter­net Explorer team released IE 8 beta 2.  It’s a mon­u­men­tal leap for­ward for not only web design­ers but also the Inter­net.  How­ever, it is not with­out con­tro­versy, but first it needs a lit­tle background.

A Lit­tle Background

Inter­net Explorer has for a long time been the bane of web devel­op­ers.  Every since they won the browser war over Netscape (near­ing a decade ago now) with what were judged uneth­i­cal and ille­gal means which led to a monop­oly inves­ti­ga­tion.  That was set­tled and Microsoft allowed to con­tinue.  Since then web design­ers have had to hack, glue, and curse IE due to its large lead on browser usage.

Inter­net Explorer 6 released in 2001 has been the infa­mous browser that just will not go away.  Grass­roots move­ment such as Save the Devel­op­ers have said “enough is enough” and want to see IE 6 erased from the tech­nol­ogy land­scape.  But even in 2008, seven years later, they still aver­age around 25% of all browsers in usage today.  IE 7 was released and was a huge step for­ward in stan­dards con­for­mance, secu­rity, and com­pat­i­bil­ity.  It gave both design­ers and end users hope for the future of IE.

The Con­tro­versy Today

Recently when IE 8 was announced it boasted an impres­sive con­for­mance to sev­eral web stan­dards includ­ing CSS 2.1, DOM improve­ments, and even parts of HTML 5.  It also boasted that it passed the Acid 2 test which tested con­for­mance to the CSS stan­dard pub­lished by the W3C.  We were all excited until they made their sec­ond announcement.

The IE team, under intense polit­i­cal pres­sure, offered three modes of brows­ing in terms of web stan­dards sup­port.  It offered the following.

1. Quirks Mode — long stand­ing behav­ior rem­i­nis­cent of IE 6, and it was used when no DOCTYPE was specified.
2. IE 7 Mode — With a DOCTYPE it ren­dered accord­ing to IE 7’s stan­dards support.
3. Stan­dards Mode — with the inclu­sion of a META tag IE 8 would ren­der in the strictest man­ner pos­si­ble accord­ing to the DOCTYPE.

The com­mu­nity revolted in a way I’ve never seen before, and the IE team decided to have the stan­dards mode be ini­ti­ated by default with a DOCTYPE, and if the designer wanted IE 7 mode he had to use a META tag.  A major vic­tory was won, and design­ers every­where rejoiced and antic­i­pated IE 8.

Com­pat­i­bil­ity Mode for Intranets

With the release of beta 2 of IE 8 they intro­duced com­pat­i­bil­ity mode with some inter­est­ing defaults.  They announced that IE 8 would, by default with a DOCTYPE, ren­der all Inter­net (pub­lic) pages in the strictest man­ner pos­si­ble per the afore­men­tioned vic­tory.  How­ever, by default all intranet sites (with a URL such as http://moss) would ren­der in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode.

It’s inter­est­ing that they men­tion Share­Point specif­i­cally in the blog post, because I’m sure this move was polit­i­cally based as I have yet to see a web-based MS appli­ca­tion with the polit­i­cal clout that Share­Point has in the enter­prise.  This set­ting is con­fig­urable by Group Pol­icy, but it is doubt­ful that many enter­prises will take this as an action item.

Thank­fully, the IE team has two META tags that can over­ride all these com­pat­i­bil­ity view set­tings.  One emu­lates IE 7 ren­der­ing engine used most promi­nently for back­wards public-facing sites, but there is also an emu­late IE 8 META tag to force sites, even spec­i­fied to ren­der in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode.

So, Why Should I Care?

I believe there are two major ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this.  The first effects the end user, and the sec­ond effects intranet devel­op­ers.  The only peo­ple I can really see car­ing about this on the devel­op­ment side are those brand­ing Share­Point.  Let’s talk about each.

First of all, the end user doesn’t have the final say whether or not a site is ren­dered in stan­dards mode or not.  Now, prob­a­bly most if not all end users could care less, but the addi­tion of a but­ton in the address bar that appears “bro­ken” des­ig­nates pages that may not be bro­ken but actu­ally ren­der­ing per­fectly in stan­dards mode but the end user could be drawn to change the behav­ior because it appears the page is bro­ken.  So with a mis­lead­ing option in the UI and over­rid­ing behav­ior given to devel­op­ers over users is a concern.

Sec­ondly, the con­cern is for those brand­ing Share­Point or other intranet sites.  What scares me is that this deci­sion was pushed by, for instance, the Share­Point team for its prod­uct.  I fear that this is indica­tive of how the next ver­sion of Share­Point will be crafted—around com­pat­i­bil­ity mode and not stan­dards mode.  Any devel­oper will tell you how hor­ren­dous the markup and CSS is for Share­Point out-of-the-box.  I was eagerly antic­i­pat­ing the Share­Point team learn­ing from their mis­takes in craft­ing the core styles and mas­ter pages by going to a much stricter standards-based site which makes it much eas­ier to brand, far more acces­si­ble, and even faster loading.

What Should MS Do?

My hope is that the IE team will respond to such a cri­tique as this as they did their first deci­sion.  Here are some steps I’d encour­age the team to take:

1. Ren­der all sites, intra or inter­net sites in stan­dards mode unless a META tag is present or lack of DOCTYPE.
2. The end user has con­trol over whether or not the site truly dis­plays one way or another.
3. Remove that con­fus­ing but­ton in the IE UI which is a poor UX decision.

Will they respond as they did before?  I don’t know, but I can only hope they’ll see the neg­a­tive ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this for end users and devel­op­ers alike.